Work with parents/carers and families can add strength and depth, and has been shown to have a significant impact in making approaches and specific interventions more effective, both by helping family life reinforce the messages of the school and through helping parents and carers develop their own parenting skills and attitudes.
The school has an important part to play in supporting the kind of parenting and family life that boosts well-being. This can be done informally, through conversation with individual parents and carers, or more formally through presentations at parents’ evenings, printed information, parenting education courses, and designated family link workers. Parents and carers who may not have had a positive experience of parenting themselves may need particular help to respond to their children’s behaviour in emotionally literate ways, to spend quality time with their children, to focus on their children’s strengths, to listen, empathise and understand the causes of their behaviour rather than acting harshly or inconsistently.
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Where work with parents and carers has been put in place to support specific school-based interventions, there is evidence of benefits in both directions, with improvement in both family and school life.
The involvement of school with home is, however, a sensitive area, especially where children and young people are in difficulty. It is important that parents and carers do not feel patronized, stigmatized and blamed for their children’s difficulties, and that schools look for strengths in families when engaging and try to build on them. This can encourage parents and carers – who may themselves have had a poor experience of school life – to feel accepted, confident and welcome. In the vital early identification of pupils with difficulties, parental input is invaluable: it is often their expressed concerns that are the first sign that something is amiss.
They should then find that their views, wishes, and feelings are taken into account, that they are kept fully informed, so they can participate in decisions taken about their children and are provided with information and support.
Source:
Document on Partnership for Well-being and Mental Health in Schools.
What works in promoting social and emotional well-being and responding to mental health problems in schools?
Advice for Schools and Framework Document (NCB- UK- National Children’s Bureau)
By: Professor Katherine Weare
Note: Credence learning foundation has sent a publishing permission message to the NCB team through contact page of their website. Permission message sent on 19th November 2018